The present invention relates to an amphibious vehicle for civil protection applications and more specifically to a vehicle derived from known multipurpose tracked vehicles of the M113, M548 types and the like.
This type of multipurpose vehicle, conceived for military use and mainly for troop transport, has a hull-like structure having watertight characteristics which make it suitable to ford watercourses by resting on the underlying bed and also to give it limited amphibious capabilities which also make it suitable to cross small bodies of water and/or to travel over swampy terrain but always in calm and shallow water.
These limited amphibious capabilities of the original vehicle, however, make it unsuitable for civil protection applications, which require vehicles capable of travelling with equal ease, maneuverability and transport capacity both in water and on the ground and more specifically even in rough water, such as floodwaters of rivers and on rough terrain, for example in the presence of rubble from collapsed buildings and the like.
Clearly, such functional capabilities, which are indispensable in vehicles for civil protection applications, entail not only the ability of said vehicle to float, but also the presence of considerable onboard power and of means for wholly or partially transferring said power to land and/or hydrodynamic propulsion elements, optionally splitting the power and distributing it, in a percentage which can vary according to the situations, to both propulsion elements.
The aim of the present invention is to provide a vehicle for civil protection applications which is derived from a multipurpose vehicle such as M113 and the like and is designed essentially for evacuation of people transport of the injured and similar applications. The above aim is achieved, according to the invention, by adding to the original M113 vehicle fore and aft buoyancy reserves which are obtained by means of corresponding elements which define watertight cavities and are permanently applied, by watertight welding, to the hull-like chassis of said original vehicle and at least one power plant which comprises an internal-combustion engine with two or more hydraulic pumps which, by means of corresponding delivery circuits including respective throttling distribution elements, feed corresponding first hydraulic motors for the simultaneous or selective driving of tracks for propulsion and steering on land and/or corresponding second hydraulic motors for the simultaneous or selective rotation of hydrodynamic propulsion and steering propellers.